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David McCullough
By Morgan Keefe One of the most significant literary influences on my writing style is David McCullough. A widely-read author of historical nonfictions, McCullough is particularly well known for his presidential biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman. He narrated several films and television documentaries, including the 2003 film Seabiscuit. I particularly admire McCullough for his ability to combine detail and drama to create true stories that are as immersive as any fiction. His biography of Harry Truman is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, telling the entire story of a man’s life in a way that makes even the least important aspects of Truman’s childhood worth reading about. He accomplishes this feat by relating every detail into his overall narrative; the seemingly excessive details later become important as McCullough draws insightful connections between early experiences and later decisions. McCullough’s level understanding of how experiences form personalities is something to which I aspire; my own characters, fictional or not, could become so much more lifelike if I could learn from McCullough. McCullough has received a plethora of awards for his historical works, including Pulitzer Prizes for both of his presidential biographies. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award conferred by the United States of America, in recognition of the cultural significance of his work. A good representation of his writing is the beginning of Chapter 13, “The Heat in the Kitchen,” from Truman. A selection follows. The Heat in the Kitchen ---- If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen. -A favorite Truman saying Exactly when Truman made up his mind to run for reelection is not known. Several times in 1947 he expressed reluctance to face another four years in the White House, “this goldfish bowl,” and again he considered the idea of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate for the Democrats. He would “groom” the general to follow him, Truman said privately. But when once more he broached the subject to Eisenhower, early in 1947, Eisenhower again declined, saying he had no political ambitions—not that he was not a Democrat. According to Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, Truman even offered to go on the ticket with Eisenhower as the Vice President, if Eisenhower so desired. “Mr. Truman was a realist and from time to time doubted whether he could win in 1948,” Royall later explained. Eisenhower was the most popular man in America. To judge by the polls he had only to nod his head and the presidency was his. Except for the “reward of service,” Truman told his Secretary of Defense Forrestal, he had found little satisfaction in being President. Bess would “give everything” to be out of the White House, and he and Bess both regretted greatly the constrictions of Margaret’s life. No man in his right mind, Truman wrote to his sister in November 1947, would ever wish to be President if he knew what it entailed. Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘em behave. Well, all the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway. “President Truman did not want to run in 1948,” John Steelman later said emphatically. Yet to others equally close day to day, it was clear the job agreed with him and they were certain he would never willingly abandon it. The whole pattern of his life had been a succession of increasingly difficult tests of his capacity to prove equal to tasks seemingly too large for him. Nor had he failed to meet this latest and greatest of tests. The feelings of inadequacy that had so troubled him after Roosevelt’s death were by now past. He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself. He was a picture of health, his color good, his weight 175, blood pressure 120-128 over 80, which was considered excellent. He still took his daily walks and still at his old Army pace of 120 steps a minute, although lately, with the press of events, he often went in the evening instead of early morning. He would complain at times of “the folderol” of the presidency, but unquestionably he enjoyed the power of the office and its trappings—the limousines, the yacht, the airplane, the special railroad car—as any vital, ambitious man would. The “abuse” he complained of to his sister was something he had long ago learned to live with. As Cabell Phillips of ''The New York Times ''would recall, Truman was “blessed with a tough hide and a secure conscience, so that he could roll with the punches… he responded with simple and exuberant delight to the flattery and deference that were showered upon him wherever he went in public life.” And he did indeed value the “reward of service” in the presidency, as in every office he had held since entering public life. A career politician, he had attained the summit of his profession, and if it was fate that put him there, then that was all the more reason to win it now on his own merits. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had,” according to Clark Clifford, “was to get elected in his own right.” Having kept so silent and uncharacteristically detached during the off-year elections in 1946, only to see his party and himself humiliated, Truman now relished the prospect of taking on the Republicans in an all-out, full-scale championship fight, as he said. He was nothing if not a partisan politician and this was the fight he simply could not walk away from. He had much he wished still to accomplish. And he know how quickly his own and New Deal programs, the liberal gains of sixteen years, could be undone by a Republican President and a Republican Congress. He felt it his duty to “get into the fight and help stem the tide of reaction,” as he later wrote. “They Republicans did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person… Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.” He saw himself battling as Jefferson had against the Federalists, or Jackson staging a revolution “against the forces of reaction.” In the long line of Republicans who had occupied the White House, he admired but two—Lincoln, for his concern for the common man; Theodore Roosevelt, for his progressive policies. To Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were the giants of the century, and he had no choice, he felt, but to fight for the Democratic heritage that had been passed on to him. “What I wanted to do personally for my own comfort and benefit was not important. What I could do to contribute to the welfare of the country was important. I had to enter the 1948 campaign for the presidency.”